The Stud Book

by Monica Drake

  A line of geese decorated the flat of the gray sky overhead. Each one found a place in the line. Nyla offered her silent blessing: I love you, geese, stringing together your necklace of selves against the sky. She wanted to blow them kisses. Her eyes teared up with love for the world, and for her place in that world, her daughters, and the baby in her stomach, and then she knew for sure she was pregnant. Who needs a test? Pregnancy was about being in love in a big way. She was glad to have her sunglasses on. Nyla was in love with the beginning of the life story, the human birth moment.

  As she drove toward the temple, she cleared her throat and asked, “You sure it’s not the Temple of Everlasting Life on Earth?”

  Arena was sure.

  Temple Everlasting.

  What was really everlasting was the string of cults that popped up in Portland, each one all bright ideas and tax evasion. When Nyla was Arena’s age there’d been the Holy Order of Mans, a mystical branch of Christians with a coffee shop called the Wheel of Fortune. They sold a cheap breakfast all day. In the old days, Nyla had done her high school homework there, where Dulcet could smoke.

  The Hare Krishnas were always around town, setting up temples in old houses, offering free vegan curry dinners.

  When she was twenty Nyla and a broke date ate gritty lentil soup from a stoneware bowl sitting on the splintered wood floor of the Krishna temple, in a cloud of incense.

  The Scientologists brought Chick Corea to play piano outside city hall, in a protest concert.

  Nyla didn’t even let herself think about the Love Family, or the Church of Jesus Christ at Armageddon, as they called themselves, with their evangelical orgies and “cum-unions.” There were grown kids in town now, Nyla’s age, born as “Jesus babies,” from straight-up religious prostitution.

  The Rosicrucians were still around. They had a saying: Every potential convert was a “walking question mark.” When they found a seeker, they knew it.

  And the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, with his followers, had been Portland’s biggest cult influx until they crashed and burned over a food scandal—intentionally lacing salmonella in a salad bar. What a disaster. It was still the only case of large-scale bioterrorism in the United States.

  Nyla had been in Portland through all of it. She’d danced in the Rajneesh disco and seen their used pink clothes filter through the resale stores then clothe the homeless when the cult shut down.

  “There it is!” Arena pointed, and tapped the car window.

  The Temple Everlasting was in a tight strip of stores on a rundown street. It was another narrow storefront, like LifeCycles. Nyla could guess the rent. They got out and went to the door. It was locked. A white sandwich board inside leaned against the glass. Arena put her face to the window and cupped her hands. “It’s amazing.”

  A sign taped to the window read FOR I AM FASHIONING A NEW HEAVEN AND A NEW EARTH, AND THE MEMORY OF THE FORMER THINGS WILL NOT ENTER THE MIND OR COME UP IN THE HEART.—GOD, OLD TESTAMENT.

  The Church of the Lousy Childhood. That’d attract a crowd.

  In a bid to stay neutral, Nyla said, “So, you’re interested in religion.”

  “It’s science, Mom.” Arena scooted along the window. “See Einstein, toward the back? His light is out.”

  Nyla put her face to the glass, too.

  With a flash of light inside the building, a naked man came through a door further back. His brown hair stuck up in a spiky imitation of Einstein’s style. His chest was more of the same. He scratched his balls and brushed his teeth.

  Arena slapped the glass, then waved.

  The man took the toothbrush from his mouth. He grabbed some kind of cloth to cover himself.

  Nyla pulled her face away fast. She stepped back. “I’m pretty sure they’re closed.”

  But Arena knocked again and waved, and soon enough the front door opened. Now the man was in a robe like something from another country, a priest’s robe, or a relic from a seventies wedding. It was floor-length white polyester with a rope of gold swirls along the neck and hem. The Church of Goodwill castoffs. He lifted the hem from the dusty floor, keeping his eyes on Arena. “Come in.”

  Arena went first. Nyla followed, but the man in his dress dropped the door on Nyla like she wasn’t there.

  The Church of Rude.

  He followed at Arena’s heels. “You drink coffee?”

  Arena said, “Of course.”

  Cult food? Nyla said, “No, we’re fine.” She tried to catch Arena’s eye.

  “I’d love a cup,” Arena said.

  Pure death. Potentially. Nyla’s palms were sweaty. She followed them both past old TVs on white pedestals. In the back of the store, Arena made herself at home at a chrome dining table. Other mismatched chairs were claimed by books, clothes, dishes. The man ducked behind a wall. There was a crash and shuffle, the sound of pans and glass.

  Arena said, “Isn’t this place cool?”

  Cool as the Goodwill bins, that grimy last stop where they sold mixed junk by the pound—Nyla had burned out on that scene a long time ago.

  What was up with her daughter? First Crystal Light, and now religion? Welcome to teenage-land.

  The man came out from behind his wall with a dusty percolator. The cups he found were ringed with stains. “I’ve got coffee here somewhere,” he said, and dug through a box of jumper cables and aerosols.

  Arena said, “This is my mom.”

  It was as though he noticed Nyla for the first time. He said, “Hey. Welcome.”

  Nyla said her own name. She reached to shake his hand.

  He said, “Mack.”

  Arena laughed. “Really?”

  Mack shrugged. “You expected something more Hindu? It’s short for Macheath. The ’rents were Threepenny Opera fans.”

  He found a rusted can of Maxwell House. If he didn’t poison them on purpose, he’d do it by accident.

  Don’t drink the Kool-Aid. Don’t trust the salad bar. Don’t go to Applebee’s. Sometimes you can trust the lentil soup. Sometimes. This is what Nyla had learned from cults.

  Mack said, “A name is a pointless point of separation, when on a cellular level, we’re all one, right?”

  Arena beamed at him.

  Mack said, “Your name and my name could be the same, right? The name of all life.”

  Nyla’s jaw tightened. She wanted to physically push him away from Arena. Nyla took a careful look at Mack’s chiseled face. She said, “Didn’t you used to tend bar?” She’d seen him around.

  He was closer to her age than to her daughter’s. Jesus Christ.

  He said, “I’ve done all kinds of things.”

  Nyla said, “I’m sure.”

  Arena picked out a stained mug, like choosing a flower from a garden.

  Nyla was determined: We are not drinking that coffee.

  Mack said, “Now I’m doing what matters,” and gave her a wide smile, like one of the blessed.

  To a lonely teenage girl, what was more seductive, sex or religion?

  Arena flipped her hair out of her eyes. She said, “Show Mom your equipment.”

  Mack gave a nervous blink.

  Nyla said, “I don’t need to see your equipment.”

  Arena said, “Can we use the camera?”

  “Camera?” Nyla echoed, as her mom instincts kicked into higher gear.

  Mack cleared his throat and made his voice deep. “We, here at the Temple Everlasting of Life on Earth, are able to document aspects of energy fields. There’s a magnetic field produced by the emotions of the human heart.”

  He stopped to find a carton of powdered nondairy creamer under a stack of clothes.

  Old white powder that could be anything, really.

  “The camera is phenomenal. It shows us we’re not as alone as we might otherwise feel,” Mack said.

  Wasn’t loneliness every pornographer’s justification?

  He said, “Let’s not set it up now, though.”

  “What have you taken pictures of?” Nyla braced for
the worst.

  “Kindred spirits.”

  He turned his religious beam toward Arena. Lust made visible. Yes, this was another cult out to poison babies. If it wasn’t salmonella in the salad bar, it was porn. Nyla said, “She’s in high school.” Her voice was low and steady.

  He said, “Really? Why isn’t she there?”

  Arena sucked in her breath, a habit she’d had since she was a baby, a flash of anxiety.

  “The Temple is about honesty. When we choose to feel our feelings, and share those shared feelings, we come closest to our truest truth.”

  Feeling feelings and truest truth? Was this guy kidding?

  He lifted the percolator. He couldn’t move far from the wall; it was still plugged in. Arena got up to go to him. This was a man who wouldn’t go out of his way for her.

  Nyla said, “We don’t need coffee.”

  “Mom,” Arena said.

  “Show me the camera.” This was a command. Nyla said it with the conviction learned through years of being a mother. There was an implied threat in her voice: or else. Or else what? She’d start counting? Or else they were in trouble? It didn’t matter. She wanted to see the setup, if only to tell police.

  Mack shuffled in his slippers toward the front of the store to the black cloak that covered the machine. “It’s an old machine. Very special. It has to warm up.”

  He gave it a pat through the cloth.

  Arena followed him. She said, “Mom, everything here is substantiated theory.” She waved a hand at the pyramids, at Einstein and Tesla. “I love substantiated theory.”

  “I’m not sure this qualifies.” Nyla almost whispered it.

  The photography machine clicked and hummed. Mack said, “I don’t believe in binaries, like religion versus science. It’s about the unifying element: particle theory.” He found a bag of tortilla chips on the floor. “Chip?” he asked.

  More food.

  No sex, no food, no naked pictures; Nyla took the bag and rolled the top closed, then shoved it in her purse. Nobody would be eating those chips.

  “It’s about energy,” Arena said. “You know what this means, right?”

  Nyla saw in her daughter the Rosicrucian saying: Arena, with her teenage slouch and her T-shirt that made no sense—uptown is neartown?—she was that walking question mark. She was it.

  “No, what does it mean?” Nyla tried to stay calm.

  Arena blew stray hair away from her face. The hair settled back across her cheek. Nyla wanted to find a hair clip in her purse, something pink with flowers, something for a kid. She wanted to take Arena home. With one hand she smoothed the hair, and tucked it behind her daughter’s tender ear.

  Arena brushed Nyla away like she was shooing off a mosquito. But she smiled, through chapped lips. She’d only just gotten her braces off the year before, but was one front tooth drifting?

  She said, “It means Dad’s still with us. He’s not gone. He’s energy.”

  Georgie flossed her teeth in the upstairs bathroom and when Bella started crying in the next room over, she paused, a white line of dental tape still laced around her fingers. It was almost midnight. She could see Humble in bed, reflected in the slice of bathroom mirror, framed by the open door. He was watching a cop show on TV.

  He said, “Did you fill out the life insurance papers?”

  Ah, crumb! Again. She didn’t want to think about ever dying, about leaving her daughter, leaving this world. Georgie stopped flossing long enough to say, “I’ll get to it in the morning.”

  “Get to it? What do you do all day?”

  The baby monitor was on her side of the bed, where it cranked up the volume of Bella’s crying and brought it out in stereo like they had unhappy twins, one in each room, one a little more electronic than the other. Humble didn’t let on that he even heard it. He had a beer on his side of the bed. Bella kept up the howl. The heartbeat of the white noise machine, with its steady thump-thump, seeped through the monitor, too. Georgie dropped her floss in the wastebasket.

  This was the first night they’d moved Bella to her own room. She was a tiny baby on a raft of cushions on a big, flat mattress in a lovely maple crib.

  Georgie walked into the bedroom, ready to sink into bed, but couldn’t relax as long as Bella was crying.

  With his eyes still on the TV, Humble leaned over and clicked the monitor off. The heartbeat and the baby’s cry were muffled but fought their way through the walls.

  “Should we check on her?”

  Humble said, “She’ll get herself to sleep.”

  Georgie felt the baby’s cry crawl through her body in a steady low-voltage electricity that powered a nearly constant tension in her neck. The heartbeat matched her own. “If we let her cry, we’re teaching her that we don’t listen.”

  Humble said, “That worked for my parents.”

  “You think your mom listens to you, even now?” Humble’s mom was present only as an absence, a grandmother who made no promises.

  Bella coughed, a choking little baby cough. It was a whole drama going on in the next room.

  Georgie said, “We’re teaching her she can’t affect her environment. We’re teaching powerlessness.”

  Humble reached for his beer and took a sip.

  “If I bring her in here, we can turn the heartbeat off,” she negotiated. The baby would hear Georgie’s heartbeat through her chest. They’d sleep that close together.

  Humble put his beer bottle down. He said, “I can’t sleep with her in the bed.”

  With that bottle, and his bed, Georgie saw him then as a grown baby. This is how his mother raised him: a crib and a bottle.

  He was a tired baby, his eyes ringed with exhaustion.

  But to let Bella cry, alone like that, even though she was only one room over, was to Georgie like leaving her on the side of the road, lost in a vast world.

  Georgie went to check on her.

  Bella was a red-faced bundle of hot tears and clenched fists. She’d kicked her blanket off.

  Newborn babies are freaky alien fish slipped from another dimension: big eyes, heavy heads, useless limbs—they swim in a climate laden with gravity; the air doesn’t support their efforts so they cry. They need support.

  Georgie put Bella on her back, in the middle of a baby blanket. Bella kicked and howled, wrinkled her face, opened her mouth. Georgie put a hand on her daughter’s chest and pulled the blanket snug around the tiny body. The first time she’d done this, it’d seemed so very wrong. She caught her daughter’s arms and legs, trapped them in the blanket, twisted the cloth and tucked one end in, making a package, a human present. Bella stopped crying. It was instantaneous: The blanket was tight, and her whole body relaxed. She closed her puffy eyes and slept.

  The womb is a snug place. A tight swaddle is as close as a newborn gets to going back home.

  Georgie picked up the package that was her newborn and carried it in one arm. She went downstairs for a glass of water. She patted Bella’s back and sang a song made up of sounds that weren’t words, and every sound was all about love. Halfway down the stairs in the dim light she took a step that didn’t work out, and she fell. That easily, her foot swished. Down she went two steps at a time. Georgie’s knee bent wrong and her body weight cut through the air until she hit the wooden floor in the downstairs hall. The baby was against her shoulder. Georgie hadn’t tumbled, she’d gone straight down. Her knee was jammed, and one hip hurt, but Bella was fine.

  There was this new clumsiness that came with motherhood: always one hip cocked out, a baby in her arms, her spine still recovering from the baby weight, her C-section scar along the front. All of it conspired to make her lose her footing.

  When she looked over her shoulder, the light of their open bedroom door cut through the dark hallway.

  “I fell down the stairs,” she called out.

  There was the sound of TV voices.

  “I wrenched my knee.”

  Still no answer.

  Georgie patted Bella’s b
ack. “I don’t know if I can stand.”

  “Did you try?” Humble’s voice was slow and gravelly.

  Georgie pictured his tired eyes. She got up on wobbly legs. She leaned with one hand against the doorway and got to her feet with less grace but the same trepidation as Bambi. Her balance was off with swaddled Bella in one arm. She hadn’t broken anything. A place on the side of her hip, maybe technically her ass, her lower ass, felt hot and as though a hand was pushing against her there. “My hip is wrecked,” she said. But she could walk. That invisible hand didn’t push her over.

  “You’ll be fine,” Humble said.

  She called back, “Really? That’s all you can do?”

  There was an ambulance wail on TV. A voice said, “… hasn’t been dead long.” Humble’s bottle clinked against the nightstand.

  So say you’re a female Asian elephant, shy, tall, and pretty. A good part of your evolutionary success is because you have the ability to grow the weight of a refrigerator in your gut, in your womb, as you carry it for nearly two years, then push it headfirst out the birth canal, the pocketbook, the elephant pussy, in a splashing river of blood and tissue.

  That’s a requirement.

  You’ll have blood down your legs, a baby on the ground. The amniotic sac should break, and if it doesn’t, that’s a problem. Make your baby breathe when it won’t. Kick it with your feet if you have to, let it slide in the blood one way then another until its eyes open, its mouth moves, air goes in.

  If you’re that newborn, your job is to walk immediately. It’s crucial. Walk away from predators, and keep close at your mom’s side even as you blink eyelashes still gummed with afterbirth, dust, and blood.

  Sarah stood outside the dry moat and wall of the outdoor enclosure watching three elephant cows and their massive offspring. How could something so big look so charmingly diminutive? Even the largest elephant moved with the dreamy grace of a parade float.

  Their ears were freckled and looked as soft and ruffled as the edge of a silk skirt. Their backs were topographical maps. Even the babies had eyes like old men, like sea turtles.